ZOEY GOT UP UNUSUALLY EARLY. It wasn’t something she’d planned, but despite having fallen asleep very late the night before, she woke up on her usual school-day schedule.
She woke fully alert and with the feeling that she had to be somewhere. A quick mental check showed that she didn’t have anything at all to do this morning. Her friends were unavailable on Sunday mornings. Aisha went to church, and Nina had long since made clear that she would kill anyone who bugged her on a Sunday before noon. Lucas also went to church, so she wouldn’t be able to see him till later.
Suddenly she remembered.
She wouldn’t be seeing Lucas at all, if she could help it.
She showered and got dressed and put on casual clothes, a pair of gray sweatpants and her red fleece jacket.
She went outside and jogged for several blocks, not through any great desire for exercise but just to burn off the wired, overalert feeling.
She jogged as far as the circle and dropped to a walk as she began to encounter the groups heading on foot toward early mass. The island’s only church had to handle both Catholics and Protestants. Catholics got the earlier hours.
Zoey told herself she was surprised to see people already filing by on their way to the church. She told herself she was worried about the possibility that she might accidentally run into Lucas and his mother on their way to the services. And when she scanned the faces in the cluster of worshipers and didn’t see Lucas’s, she told herself she was relieved.
She walked on through the circle, feeling disgruntled and confused. She couldn’t think of a good reason why she had come out this early, and now she couldn’t think of anything to do. Maybe she should brave Nina’s wrath and wake her up. There was no good reason why Nina had to sleep until noon. Or even eight.
Claire poured coffee into her covered mug and walked back upstairs from the kitchen, past Nina’s second-floor room, to her own third-floor bedroom. She climbed up the ladder set in one wall of her bedroom. It led to a rectangular hatch in the ceiling. From long practice she had learned to hook one arm around the ladder, using that hand to hold her coffee mug and push the hatch open with her free hand.
She climbed up through the hole and out onto the widow’s walk, a square platform atop the house with low railings all around and towering brick chimneys at each end.
It was her favorite place in the world.
Up here the breeze almost always blew. The view encompassed all the northern end of Chatham Island, all of the harbor that gave the tiny brick and shingle and cobblestone village of North Harbor its name.
To the north was the black-and-white-striped lighthouse on its tiny rocky islet. To the west the fishing boats rocked at anchor or were tied up alongside the pier. The ferry was just pulling in, appearing slowly and mysteriously from a fog bank like some magician’s trick. Weymouth and the whole mainland were invisible behind the fog. To the south the piney ridge rose from the edge of the village and Claire could make out a glimpse of Gray House, Aisha’s home, through the trees.
The breeze wasn’t moving the fog, not yet. And there would be little sun to burn it off. Overcast blanketed the entire area, turning the small visible circle of the Atlantic the color of lead.
She looked down at the street below, at Lighthouse Road, which separated the row of old restored captains’ homes like hers from the jagged rocks and tumbled granite boulders of the north shore.
Claire saw Zoey at the same instant that Zoey’s eyes, looking up, met hers.
Claire sighed. Way too early for this, but it had to be done. It was the necessary last step in the process.
She made a slight wave. Then she held out her hand, making a sign for Zoey to wait. As she turned to descend the ladder it occurred to her that Zoey might not want to wait. Presumably Claire wasn’t her favorite person in the world right now.
But no, of course Zoey would wait. Zoey would be hoping against hope that Claire would somehow tell her something to make everything all right.
Oddly enough, Claire realized, that’s just exactly what she was going to do.
Jake woke to pounding on his bedroom door. The first thing he was aware of was a huge, all-encompassing pain in his head. It throbbed monstrously as he turned his head on his pillow.
With the pain came a terrible thirst. His mouth felt as if it had been stuffed full of cotton balls. He opened his eyes and almost cried out from the pain. Eyes swollen. Stomach sick and sour. Muscles cramped and bunched.
“Jake, get up now. You have to get ready for church.”
His mother’s voice through his door, seeming impossibly loud.
“Okay,” he croaked.
“Are you awake?”
He had to fight down the urge to throw up. “Yes,” he said tersely.
“Don’t be late,” his mother chirped in her relentlessly cheerful way.
He sat up and rolled his legs over the side of the bed. He was still wearing pants, though no shirt. At once he knew he would throw up. He jumped up and raced for his bathroom, almost crying from the pain in his head. He slipped and fell to his knees on the tile floor, clutching the toilet bowl with both arms, and heaved.
When he was done, he rolled onto his back on the tile. He was crying now but too dehydrated to form tears, just racking sobs of misery and pain.
At last he forced himself up and stripped off his pants. Damp sand was in the pockets and down his crotch. He staggered into the shower. He swallowed from the jet, gulping and gulping, then vomited it all back up again.
At last with at least some water working its way back through his system and three Advil, he made his way back to his bedroom, still throbbing with one large head-to-toe pain.
He looked around, befuddled. Obviously he had gotten drunk the night before. Either that or he had been poisoned. Maybe they were pretty much the same thing. He had some memory of a party. He remembered music. A flash of people dancing. A flash of himself dancing with Zoey. A disturbing half-memory of Claire, in shadow, her eyes glittering, as dangerous as a snake’s.
Then he remembered it all and wished he could have another drink.
Zoey met Claire in the Geigers’ front yard. Claire was still carrying her mug of coffee and looking effortlessly elegant, as always. Zoey was acutely aware of her own relative frumpiness in sweatpants and the fleece jacket.
“Out jogging?” Claire asked pleasantly.
“Just walking. I woke up early and couldn’t get back to sleep.” Zoey waited for some sign of guilt on Claire’s face, but there was nothing.
“Mmm. I wanted to see the fog,” Claire said. “It’s unusually dense. You can feel the moisture. You know, fog is really just a very low cloud. Warmer air moving in across the cold surface of the water and you get condensation that—”
“Claire, I don’t want to talk to you about weather,” Zoey snapped, surprising herself. Claire’s eyebrows shot up.
“Sorry,” Claire said.
“I just want you to know that I think you’re a bitch,” Zoey said. “I mean, a real backstabbing bitch.”
Claire colored slightly and stared with hard eyes. “What’s your problem?”
“What do you mean, ‘what’s my problem’?”
“I mean, what’s your problem,” Claire repeated. “I thought we were having a friendly little chat here, and suddenly you go off.” She waved her mug slightly for emphasis.
Zoey faltered. If Claire was just putting on an innocent act, it was a good one. “What do you think I’m going to do, Claire, just act like you and Lucas are no big deal?”
“What?”
“You and Lucas, Claire. You and Lucas.”
“What about me and Lucas?” Now she sounded genuinely annoyed.
Zoey peered closely at her. Claire’s big, almond-shaped dark eyes showed no evidence of guilt or even worry. “Jake told me all about it,” Zoey said, but with less certainty.
“Jake? Now Jake’s involved? Zoey, what the hell are you trying to say?”
“Jake told me at the party last night that you slept with Lucas,” Zoey blurted.
Claire’s rare, cool smile formed slowly. “Jake told you I slept with Lucas. Jake, who hates Lucas for taking you away from him; Jake, who still carries a major torch for you; Jake, who was so drunk he had to be carried home; that Jake told you I slept with Lucas.”
“That’s what he said,” Zoey replied as staunchly as she could manage.
Claire sipped her coffee and gave Zoey a disappointed look. “I told Jake that Lucas and I went for a drive a few days ago. I was mad at Jake because I saw you and him hugging each other like you were back together. Lucas saw the same scene. That and other things made us both suspicious that you and Jake were thinking of getting back together. So we went for a drive to discuss it. That’s what I told Jake.”
Zoey tried to think of something to say, but now she was thoroughly confused. If what Claire was saying was true, then . . . then it had been Lucas who thought she was being unfaithful. And it was Lucas who had been wronged. And Jake was the bad guy, not Claire or Lucas. “Nothing happened between you and Lucas?”
“I did not have sex with Lucas,” Claire said sharply. Then she batted her eyes in a parody of coquettishness. “Although he is cute, isn’t he?”
“Oh, no,” Zoey said, ignoring Claire’s attempt to get a rise out of her.
“I can’t believe Jake would tell you a story like that,” Claire said. “I suppose it was a clumsy attempt to break you and Lucas up.”
“But why would he want that?” Zoey asked.
“I told you,” Claire said with just a hint of bitterness. “I think he’s still in love with you. And”—she shrugged—“we’re basically finished as a couple, so, frankly, you’re welcome to him.”
Lucas had gone to confession the day before, early Saturday morning. He had confessed to using bad language, to lying by omission, and to his normal array of sins associated with the vice of lust. The priest had given him the usual penances, seemingly unshocked by the fact that a teenage boy had lust in his heart.
He took Holy Communion with his mother. She was the main reason he attended mass. His father no longer did, and his mother seemed to appreciate or even need her son’s company. He had even, somewhat absurdly, prayed for Zoey to come back to him. But he wasn’t generally a big believer in prayer, since he’d spent the first year at Youth Authority praying they’d let him out early and that hadn’t exactly worked. Neither had those last-minute prayers when he realized he was facing a pop quiz on some subject he hadn’t studied. God had never stepped in and decided to give him a free A. Evidently, what with having to run the entire universe, God had better things to do with his time.
The fog that earlier had drifted across the circle was beginning to lift now as he and his mother stepped out of the church. Departing Catholics mingled cordially with the Protestants who were waiting around preparing to go in.
Lucas saw Jake and his mother standing some distance away. Jake was sitting on a bench, his head hanging practically down to his knees. Lucas grinned with the good-natured sadism sober people often feel toward drinkers. Jake was a classic, textbook picture of a guy with a brutal hangover.
He made his way down the steps as his mother was peeled off into a discussion having to do with potluck dinners and the need to avoid having duplicate bowls of Jell-O salad. He waved good-bye to her and headed around to the right. He wanted to check out the beach, see if there was any hope of surf. He had a lot to think through, and surfing always helped.
Just as he cleared the crowd, though, he came face-to-face with Zoey.
He stopped dead in his tracks. She was dressed sloppily, for her, but looked painfully beautiful to his eyes.
He tried to find something to say, but where should he start? What should he say? Hi, Zoey, look, I didn’t have sex with Claire, we just made out?
Zoey came closer, and to Lucas’s utter amazement, she put her arms around him, tilted back her head, closed her blue eyes, and drew his face down to her. She kissed him in a way that sent something very much like an electric shock through his system and immediately added to the list of sins he would have to confess next week.
“What?” he said when she drew back at last. “I mean—”
“I have to go see my dad now because I told him I would,” Zoey said, “but if we could get together this evening, I would really like a chance to apologize to you.”
“Apologize?”
“Claire told me what Jake said was a lie,” Zoey said. “I am desperately sorry I suspected you, Lucas. And later I would like to show you just how sorry I am.”
She kissed him again, despite the dirty looks of various parishioners, both Catholic and Protestant. Then she took off, leaving Lucas feeling foolish and giddy and aware that he was smiling stupidly and not caring.
The question was: Now that he had the prayer thing working, would it also work on tests?